I'm giving up alcohol today.

I've not mentioned all the things which I wanted to, but I'm going to make this statement right now, just to put on record the private decision that I've made.

I went to a wonderful party on Saturday night. Danced, played the fun-money casino tables, nibbled delicious canapes... and drank approximately my bodyweight in booze. The party finished at 1.30, and we came back home with the three people staying in our house, and I carried on drinking and made an absolute idiot of myself. I can't do moderation. I get excited about social occasions, and a few glasses takes the edge off and feels festive, but then I can't stop.

And do you know what? Enough is enough. I'm too old to be behaving like this. It's undignified and I don't like it. I spend too much money, I take on board too many calories, I feel remorseful every morning after and I don't want my children to think that it's the norm. I've been very careful not to over-indulge in front of them, but they're getting older and staying up later...

I've given up for a month at a time in the past, but I'm under no illusions that this will be harder. For a starter, none of my friends will understand, and even if they do, they will take it as some sort of reproof. They will think I'm not going to be so much fun. Even my partner isn't exactly chuffed at my decision. His immedate response is that I will be disapproving of him for not having made the same decision.

However I've been considering this for a long time and I really think that I've come to the point where this decision is inevitable.

I feel quite excited about it. Now I've got to find something non-alcoholic apart from water, that I enjoy drinking...

Phil Parker listened to my screenplay...and part of me wishes he hadn't.

You can always tell when my life is going crazy, because I lose track of my blog.

Diarists of old have recorded all the interesting events of history, and I wonder why it is that when really interesting things happen in my life, or around me, my inclination is to enjoy the experience rather than record them.

Makes me a pretty shoddy writer, I'd suggest. As a real writer, my first response to events SHOULD be to write them down. That is, after all, rather the point of starting this blog.

Well, for another hint that maybe I'm not as great as I thought I was, let's turn to Phil Parker.

I went to my regular meeting with Bristol Screenwriters www.bristolscreenwriters.org, a long arranged fixture where there was to be a reading of my screenplay. Now you have to understand that normally they read shorts and then there's some feedback from all of us and it's all very civilised. The month before they'd read a feature by the marvellous Virgina Bergin and were feeling kindly disposed to me. We were lucky enough to have Phil parker, screenwriting guru, in attendance. He gave a short talk and then my reading started.

Oh. My. God. It was ENDLESS.

The reading was HORRENDOUS. I mean really truly dreadful. God, that story takes AGES to get going. You could see people losing the will to live, going pale and twitchy before me...

At the end they all applauded wildly, more out of relief that it was finally over than from any sense of enjoyment. And then they all tore it to bits - slow, stereotypical characters, plot that didn't work, too much talk, too many characters.... you name it, really.

Then they asked Phil for his impressions. He was unbelievably impressive. he had such a bird's eye view of the thing, he remembered every scene just from one reading, and the name of every character, even the ones who didn't say anything.

He told me:

a) The THEME of the story is the creation of order out of chaos. he advised that once you have identified the theme of the story, you should make sure that every scene has in it that theme in some way.
b) Several of the people in my group had complained that this was a two-hander and therefore it was not clear whose story we were examining. Phil said this didn't matter as long as you knew what the ENGINE of the story was. In my case the engine of the story is the relationship between two grannies. What follows from this is that there must be no scene which doesn't feature one of the two grannies, and their relationship with each other and the others must be at the heart of every scene.
c) Some felt there were too many CHARACTERS in the piece. Phil didn't think so, although he did say that characters shouldn't be weighted too equally; some of them should recede into the background more, whereas some should assume more of a function in the piece.
d) In terms of the functions of the the various characters, as I've said the grannies are the ENGINE of the piece. One character is the CATALYST; by which I mean that it is his actions which effect the central problem. Another is the OBSTACLE to what the grannies are trying to achieve.
e) He liked the idea of my initial set-up but felt it needed to be dramatically cut from about 30 pages to 10. He thought the last thirty pages were great and should stay. WHich leaves me without a second act. But now I know what to do with that.
f) To objections about stereotypical characters he said he didn't think it mattered because it's comedy and there is a great tradition of streotypes in comedy. Thinking about the comments I think when people talk about 'stereotype' they mean 'cartoon', which I'll plead guilty to.

In addition there were certain pieces of advice about the actual process of writing which I think are worth mentioning.

a) Phil referred throughout not to scripts but to PROJECTS. I think this is important because that word 'project' has a sense of continuity about it, whereas to me a 'script' is something finished.
b) He also said that you should keep a copu of every draft of your project. And he would expect any 'finished' script to be the productr of about thirteen drafts, and that they would not be progressive, but that finished version would probably draw on elements from each draft. I've not done this - every 'draft' has been a rewrite, and my initial version has been changed each time, without retaining the original or earlier form. I can't therefore go back thinking, 'let's take that relationship out of version 4'. So he works in new drafts, rather than rewrites. He didn't use the word rewrite at all.
c) His advice was to start every new draft afresh, rather than cutting and pasting, in order to retain energy and freshness.

I@m deeply grateful, but I'm taking a couple of weeks to digest all this and regather my enthusiasm.

In the meantime I'm working on the novel I put on the shelf a few months back. I read it through and was enthused.

Maybe I have to accept that this is just the way I work. I've always known that I have a low boredom threshhold.

Overheating

Scary article in the Sunday Times yesterday. The cover of the magazine featured a photograph of the effect on the United Kigdom if the climate were to heat up by couple of degrees as it's widely predicted to do over the next hundred years. Bristol is underwater. Actually most places are underwater.

I have friends who have taken this seriously for years and I've always had a slightly sceptical view, but the weight of evidence seems to be swinging in the direction of the Doomsday scenario.

So what can I do? Well, holiday in this country, for starters. Or use the train to go into Europe. Anything not to take flights except for those long-anticipated experiences to far-flung places which will be, as they were decades ago, something you do once in a lifetime.

Now governments have got to ensure that they get the pricing right so that people will actually use those trains. At the moment I can fly to Nice for £14, but if I want to get to London at 8.30 in the morning it'll cost me about £90 to hang from a strap for an hour and a half. Ludicrous.

I LOVE trains. I 'eurorailed' when I was a teenager and a student and met the most fantastic people as I cruised through country after country, watching the landscape and the lifestyles roll by before my eyes. The British trains were always the crappiest and the dearest. Czech trains were my favourite; clean, old-fashioned and somehow rather regal. I'm really looking forward to taking the kids and meandering through Europe. I think we'd need to take the car on the train with us. In Britain, naturally, that's completely prohibitive, but I expect Europe is more clued-up.

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam

I know I'm very, very old and very, very grumpy, but my current receipt of spam at about 150 emails a day is getting me down. No, actually, it's making me foam at the mouth.

So I'd just like to put on record the following:

a) I don't need a degree with no work. I've already got two degrees which I worked hard to achieve, and as a self-improver, I don't value anything which is got easily. I want to BE cleverer, not LOOK cleverer

b) I don't have any spare cash, so I will not be buying any shares. Even if I'm sent the same share tip 70 times in a day (oh, yes!) I WON'T BUY IT. Nor will any of the people whose email addresses are vaguely similar to mine but whose emails I am receiving.

c) I do not need or want Viagra. Mainly because I do not have a penis.

d) For the same reason, I do not need anything to make my non-existent penis larger, and my non-existent penis is unlikely to give any women, or men for that matter, more pleasure if it is enlarged.

There. I feel better already. Now I've just got to find the time to do something about it.

Talking of teenagers

I just crashed into one in my car, and she couldn't have been sweeter. This is especially remarkable given the facts that a) it was entirely my fault, and b) she was on the way home in the car she'd just picked up from the showroom about twenty minutes earlier, followed by her proud Dad, who was equally nice and unbelievably reasonable.

Sorry, Sharmaine. I'm really, truly sorry.

In praise of teenagers

I may have mentioned before that I love teenagers, and enjoy their company, which I find stimulating and entertaining. I think they get a very raw deal in the media, in society and even in the street, where they tend to be viewed with deep suspicion by a wary and fearful populace.

It was therefore very heartwarming to observe samples of the species behaving as responsible citizens not once but twice last week as I went about my business. On the first occasion, as I was driving to work, I saw an elderly lady prostrate on the ground, obviously shocked and injured, accompanied by two young teenagers. The first, a young girl, knelt by the lady and comforted her while a boy was gesticulating on a mobile phone, obviously giving directions to the emergency services. Mewanwhile we drones all drove past, wondering if we should stop, but in no doubt that they were coping admirably.

The following day I drove past a tiny blind old lady whom I know well hesitating at rhe side of the road, a teenager holding each arm and chatting animatedly to her, utterly unfazed and unselfconscious. She smiled with pleasure. I'm particularly pleased about this last incident. A couple of years ago this same old lady, still then with some residual sight, was mugged by a teenager not far from where we both live. She was terribly shaken, but was scooped up by another teenage boy who popped her in his car, got a description and drove around looking for the culprit before abandoning the search and taking her to the police station. He was outraged on her behalf. Nice that the balance of her experiences with the young should be, we hope, positive.

Then I had a long conversation with my eighteen year-old nephew, who was talking about his plans to go to an American university on a soccer scholarship. He is a thoroughly admirable, personable, sociable person, and if my kids turn out like him, I shall be well happy.

Added to all that I am lucky enough to spend a sizeable portion of each day in the classroom with teenagers, mainly boys, and it keeps me young. It's a cliche, but as we know there is some truth in most cliches.

I wouldn't want to be one though - all those hormones, all those challenges, all that angst. And who was the idiot who decreed that we should make young people sit important exams with a major impact in directing their future at a time when they are a puddle of hormones and just thinking about getting their ends away...?